I’ve been learning French for 45 years now, and I’m making slow but steady progress.
I’m no longer confused about verb tenses, but whether they are indicative or subjunctive. At this rate I shall be fluent by the time I’m ninety, longevity and dementia permitting.
My earliest learning was at high school. Everyone used to learn two languages for the first couple of years, French and Latin for the top stream, and French and Te Reo Māori for the rest. It seems fantastical now, can it be that I’m remembering this wrongly? Well, at least Te Reo was available (assuming I’m remembering correctly), when my daughters were at high school it wasn’t even an option.
One early lesson that I remember vividly was “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a dans le panier?”, or “What is there in the basket?” which was an excuse to make us memorise things that you might take on a picnic, but which now sounds a lot more intimidating to my ears, as something you might hear snarled at you by a customs officer (or douanier).
Most of my studies these days are virtual, on various podcasts or on Duolingo. I did used to have a weekly zoom lesson with a native French speaker, but last March I realised we hadn’t had a lesson since before Christmas, and by then it was too embarrassing to get back in touch (I thought you were going to ring me). It’s a bit of a shame as she was lovely and she charged me a criminally low amount (I did try to pay her more but she refused).
Anyway, I’ve been putting extra hours into Duolingo and it’s mostly pretty good. There is the occasional boo boo though. A few weeks ago it asked me to translate these English phrases into French:
Well, that’s OK, everyone has the odd bad day and it didn’t bother me. More worrisome was a conversation I had with one of the characters last week. For context, she’s a harmless granny type character called Lucy with the backstory of being some sort of international spy when she was younger. I was already feeling a little unnerved because she’d casually mentioned the fact that I was a doctor and that I liked to take my dogs Max and Maggie on walks to the beach near my house. Then the conversation got onto passwords.
Here she is asking if I’ve ever had a funny password. I replied that I didn’t want to talk about passwords, and she said that was fine, but then just kept going:
Here she’s asking if I use a manager for passwords (a list I store somewhere I assume, or when your device remembers them for you) or do I prefer to remember them myself? Well, I didn’t like where this dialogue was going at all so I bailed as soon as I could (without losing any of the points I’d already earned). Maybe I’m being paranoid but does this seem right to you? I suppose even AI characters have to put food on the table.